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advocates now claim
to offer women a greater sense of autonomy – control over their own
bodies without the intervention of chemical or medical agents. The
shifting status of NFP epitomises the interplay between secular and
Catholic ideas around sex and gender which took place in late-modern
England. The way Catholic authorities respond to innovations such as
this, and there seems to be little or no response

historical setting, but a composite part of a ‘liberationist’
climate.
Investigating Catholic women’s sexual experience
Throughout the history of the
Catholic Church, the meaning and function of sex had been considered to
be trans-historical, prescribed by the strictures of
natural law. That the Church’s definition of sexuality could be shaped
by human intervention represented a

Grace will please return trusting your grace will pardon a broken
hearted Mother.120
Catherine’s appeal to the archbishop is striking in both its humility and
sense of entitlement. Catherine referred to her position as a mother to
demonstrate not only her need for, but also her right to, intervention.121
She portrayed herself as fulfilling her duties as a Catholic mother:
bearing and raising children and caring for their material and religious
needs. She emphasised that the parish priest could vouch for her son’s
worth, thus stressing that she had created close bonds

examining Christianity’s transformation and its continued cultural influence. 69 Timothy Jones’s intervention suggests the ‘teleology of decline’ may be a Eurocentric norm rather than a global standard and considers a post-secular view that returns to considering religion as a category of analysis and asking, as this research does, new questions of religious change. 70 Secularisation debates became a major discourse, in the Church, in the press and in universities. Women religious were operating in this secular age.
The twentieth-century Catholic world in Britain was

intervention sat comfortably with the provision of practical care and assistance’. 65
The role of parish sister was revitalised in the 1970s. One sister writing in 1973 identified it as a new ‘trend’: ‘Yes the trend here, with regard to the Religious, is to take a more active part in Parish work, and Sisters must recognise their membership in the People of God. As yet, all these new ideas are at an experimental stage.’ 66 Parish sisters in small communities had varied responsibilities and the latitude to react to the needs of the parish. In one small community in Flint

’ Catholics is not a limitation of the book but the very thrust
of its intervention. Putting aside for a moment the ‘liberal’ and
‘orthodox’ dichotomy of the birth-control debate, my overarching aim is
to interrogate what ‘liberation’ meant to Catholic individuals and
institutions in a post-war context.
The issue of representativeness has consistently been
viewed as a stumbling-block for oral historians. How

recognised sex to be a legitimate site for expert
intervention, a subject that could be taught and learnt, studied and
understood. 13
In the following three sections, the CMAC’s internal
correspondence and counsellor training manuals are used alongside the
interviewees’ recollections to explore the relationship between
prescription and practice. Twenty of the twenty-seven interviewees used

slowly but broadly among peoples who have inherited other traditions or cultures … Since women are becoming ever more conscious of their human dignity, they will not tolerate being treated as mere material instruments, but demand rights befitting a human person both in domestic and in public life. 63
And yet it was not so obvious to John XXIII that women should be invited to participate in the Second Vatican Council. Two years after the opening of the Council, at the intervention of Suenens, who reminded the Pope that ‘Women too should be invited as auditors, unless

( 37i and 37ii ); indeed, their lack of proper power in secular affairs effectively excluded church officials from any meaningful engagement with affairs of state. Wyclif is careful to point out in the sixth chapter of On the Office of the King that, of the two, the king’s office was superior ( 37i ). The king was quite at liberty to exercise his authority over ecclesiastical administration, especially in relation to perceived errors of the church, but any such intervention had properly to relate to secular, rather than spiritual, affairs of the church. In